Author: Alexander Drok - Mirasvit Magento Extensions

Checkout page is the one of the key parts of your e-commerce store. Your sales are directly dependent from its usability and convenience. Even the smallest shortcoming or error can significantly harm conversation rate.

The most common way is to select so-called "onestepcheckout extension", which brings all order elements (such as shipping, billing addresses, shipping & payment methods, etc.) to the single page. It simplifies order placement and makes it much easier for a customer.

As you see – the faster your website downloads, the more money you get. Magento 2 stores have the specific list of actions for improving site speed you can take at the very start and we are going to share it with you.

It’s not a problem to manually fill meta information for few dozen products and categories. In other hand, if you have few thousand products it can be nightmare. Moreover you can’t configure meta tags for layered navigation pages, Magento 2 just doesn’t have such functionality.

During several years we have been studying and implementing various approaches to improve a speed of store server and frontend.

For an online store, the most important aspect is the operation speed. And here, it is important not only how fast a server returns a page to a client (TTFB), but also, how quickly the client can download this page and all related resources (files js, css, images, fonts).

The speed of operation is one of the most significant factors which affects the SERP ranking in search engines (Google, Bing etc). The faster a server generates the page and a client downloads it, the higher your store is in the search results at all the other things being equal.

When a customer knows what he needs to buy, his first action is to find the product through a quick search. The presence of a quick drop-down menu with the found goods (auto-complete) allows him to find the right product quickly without leaving the search line. The customer has only to complement the search query with the necessary criteria and then he will see the result.

Customers expect that search results will be shown instantly (they know experience of Google or Amazon search). But technically it is very hard to achieve such level of speed in Magento store. Every request to Magento needs to initiate magento core, which speed of initialization limits the speed of our search.

To solve this problem and to greatly speed up Magento search, we have created and added a new feature to our search extensions. We named it the Fast Mode.

Unlike in Magento 1, cron performs critically important tasks in Magento 2. In the native installation there are 26 modules that use cron for 53 different jobs. You can get acquainted with the full list of modules below on the text.

We suppose, no one needs a proof that communication with customers is decidedly important and that a quick response to a users’ questions strongly affects the conversion rate in any store. At present, it is not enough just to tell everything on the site pages - many of potential customers prefer to ask than to look for the necessary information on the store pages.

Since the first days of mirasvit.com (since 2012), we have been actively used Zopim chat (now it is named Zendesk Chat). About a third part of our customers ask questions before placing their orders and as much ask after the purchase is completed.

Imagine the situation: any user visits your store and gets a page with 404 error. He/she does not obtain the required content and, consequently, starts hesitating. In most of cases, he/she does not keep searching for the information on your store but rather prefers not to make any purchase.